Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom — Aristotle
I have always been someone who wanted to be self-aware. As most texts and scholarly writings proclaim, it is one of the ultimate things to achieve. Being a disciple and follower of spirituality and philosophy, it certainly was a destination / goal for me. Yet, I could never clearly get my head around what exactly it means. Does it mean being aware of your thoughts, feelings, and emotions. These keep changing every minute — so if I am aware of it for some time and then my mind drifts away and I don’t pay attention to it any more, does that mean I was self aware for a short period and then I’m not self aware any more. In that case how can you say a person is self-aware if this is a fleeting thing. Who can really be aware of their thoughts and feelings all the time? And how does it all work?
A lot of these questions stayed in the back of my mind and I never really got to finding answers to them until recently. Tasha Eurich’s book Insight is one of the most cited references I have found on self-awareness and has been a great source of information and ‘awareness’ on this subject for me. I will base this writing on some findings from the same as well as my own personal interpretations and experiences.
As the book defines it, there are seven pillars of self-awareness which basically revolve around the following the following 3 tenets:
Knowing what matters to you
Knowing what you want to accomplish
Knowing how you behave and how others see you
What this means is to be self-aware you need to know your values, passions and aspirations. You also need to know what kind of environment you fit best into, recognize patterns in your thinking and behavior and be aware of the impact you create on others. Obviously these are a lot and that’s what makes being self-aware so hard. Each of these pillars is dynamic and being aware of each of these facets even as they change will require awareness. Now how does one find out what each of these are for you? Most people think that you can achieve self-awareness by thinking more about each of these things. Surprisingly as I too discovered, thinking about ourselves is not correlated with knowing ourselves. Counter-intuitive, right? For this we need to know what is the difference between thinking and awareness. Here is the answer: Thinking is thought intensive while awareness is presence or simple attention in the moment. Thinking happens in the mind and awareness is integrated across body, mind and soul. For example, on a regular office day, you may be thinking intensely about how to complete a piece of work, while at the same time you might be feeling a sense of fear combined with tiredness. Because you are so worried about meeting the deadline and what will happen if you don’t meet it, thought overcomes the feeling and we become more thoughtful than aware.
I also learned that self-awareness consists of two parts:
Internal Self-Awareness
External Self-Awareness
Internal self awareness relates to gaining awareness of things that are in a sense ‘internal’ to you — your values, passion, aspirations etc. Mindfulness is one of the first skills you need to cultivate in order to become internally self aware. Mindfulness can be achieved both through meditative and non-meditative methods. You can also try answering questions you will find in this article by Darius Foroux. Another part of being internally self aware is looking at your past and envisioning what you would like in the future. Aligning your actions, and behaviors according to your values and being aware of what actions you take in different situations all contribute to your internal self awareness.
External self awareness is about being aware of what people think of you. It is important to understand how we appear to others and the impact that we have on people whom we interact with. Particularly at leadership roles, it is very important to understand what the team and other stakeholders in an organization perceive of you. It directly affects the amount of co-operation one gets from their team as well plays a significant role in happiness of employees in an organization. Only when we open our minds to finding out what others see in us, do we become aware of certain lacunas in us or misconceptions that we may have created which negatively impact more than we could imagine.
So that’s a quick starter on what I think it means to be self aware. If you are interested in hearing more or contributing to the topic of self-awareness, do join my LinkedIn group on the same. I will be publishing more on this topic.
References:
Insight by Tasha Eurich